Walter Logeman: Journal
Just watched the last episode of season 4 of the Peaky Blinders. Loved it. I hear there will be a season 5, and the show is set up to deal with British politics in the 1920’s . Got me looking around and found this piece – a good bit of background reading.
The concept of medial understanding was the forerunner of what I call today co-conscious and co-unconscious states. Such a technique of reciprocal comprehension and “interpersonal memory” seemed to make possible astonishing matrimonial psychodramas, husband and wife reaching back into their first encounter and reliving, often with astonishing detail, all their moments of love and suffering, their silent tragedies and their moments of great decision
(Moreno, 1923).
Just how to produce such dramas remains somewhat obscure to me. Will experiment – and research!
The quote above is from this article by JL “Interpersonal Therapy and Co-Unconscious States, A Progress Report in Psychodramatic Theory” originally from: Group Psychotherapy, 14 (3-4), 234-241 (Sept-Dec., 1961) See PDF below.
This is my summary of what Moreno means by the social atom. In psychotherapy that “atom” or pattern is the client. When two of these “patterns” connect in love, then a lifelong process can follow. Maybe it is true love at first sight? Unlikely, love is blind. One possibility is to move from blind love to deep mature connection. The other possibility is hell. A third is lifeless boredom.
A post by Ellen Bader on the attachment debate.
A Debate worthy of study.
I’d say they are a dialectical pair.
In a technological era like ours, the fate and future of the spontaneity principle as a major pattern of culture and living may depend on good fortune in tying it up with technological devices.
Moreno Psychodrama v. 1 p. 403
I had to do a big thing. The whole of this blog was corrupted. Nothing. With long guides about how to reinstall and reconnect to the database I did it.
I was scared of loosing this. I realise how much I love it when it is gone. Like Christchurch after the earthquake – I was not really home here in Christchurch till now when it is just a mess.
Pleased to see my post about wisdom & consciousness come up. How against the grain that is! I wonder why so may of the people I know who are “idealist in the philosophical sense” don’t dispute my outrageous claims against the received wisdom that is the engine that drives psychotherapy and pretty much all of self help and liberal politics.
Never mind… I’m saying nothing original, just marxism and Moreno stuff that no-one seems to get. I’m curious… is this important? I don’t think liberal tolerance of liberal ideas is a healthy thing. But then it does not really matter… that is the point, reality will win out no matter what stories we tell.
Bear with my reflections…
The ideology does not matter, but being in touch with what reality is up to… that does matter. Who can really figure What is to be done at this time? Wishful thinking wont help much.
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Anyway, pleased the blog is back
Later, Tuesday, 17 October, 2017
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
… every culture is characterized by a certain set of roles which it imposes with a varying degree of success upon its membership.
Moreno Who Shall Survive? p. 88
Two forms of the cultural conserve are referred to in my writings: the technological conserve, as books, motion pictures, robots, and the “human” conserve, the conserve which uses the human organism for its vehicle.
Psychodrama v. 1 p. 123
Love the work of Austin Kleon – this is an image from his 2018 Calendar
If “the focal conflict model” could be described in a picture, this is it. The black abyss shows the depth of the concept, and “We” that it is often something we share. The group is larger than the sum of its parts and can have its own disturbing motives.
Here is a link to the original analytic paper about these matters.
Pace Layers Thinking: Paul Saffo and Stewart Brand @ The Interval — January 27, 02015
Wonderful podcast. Great exposition of an idea that came through looking at houses and then could be generalised.
The thinking applies to design as well as social change.
The image gives the idea:
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I think of other theories of change:
Needs more explaining but has broad application W = warm-up
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And then there is Dialectics. Not to be dismissed. Hegelian and then Marxist.
Just listened to Plato’s Republic podcast on BBC, In out Time — Plato’s Republic MP3
Got me thinking about the story of the cave. Ordinary people are fooled. Only certain elite trained people can see the world properly. They are enlightened. At one point they mention that knowledge (according to Plato) is not “bits” but that at a certain point there is a whole shift to a new mental state. It reminds me of spiritual enlightenment. They use the word ‘enlightenment’ in the podcast.
I think a qualitative shift in knowledge is possible. But it is not in the state of mind, that makes the shift. Something has been discovered, it is based on evidence. It can be taught, e.g. The world is round – species evolve. That is not a new state of mind, anyone can learn these things. There is “common wisdom” (maybe as old as this stuff in Plato) that ordinary learning won’t do the trick, that we need to go through some spiritual process of cleansing, saving or sitting and that there are special teachers. Plato certainly raises the right question – what is knowledge and what is belief, but his answers are not convincing, and maybe pernicious.
“We need a new state of consciousness before the world can change.” I hear that a lot. This spiritual answers seem wrong, yet Marx also talked of class consciousness. Certainly we need thorough study and knowledge. But the paradigm shifts don’t happen to “us” they happen as science, and social science discovers more about the way the things and people work. Then people need to be taught that stuff.
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Listened to another rather wonderful podcast Kim Hill interview with Ken Loach — Ken Loach – Life and films MP3 One moment I liked was where he says that class struggle in capitalism is not a belief of some kind. Once you have learned about it, like evolution, it is how it is.
Ken Loach:
